The Receiver Grows Restless: Perceiving and projecting musical silence
On November 5, 2021, Guy Livingston will present at an International Colloquium at the University of Lorraine (France), entitled: "Se taire, écouter, (en) parler : voix et silences des récepteurs".
Livingston's conference presentation is titled "The Receiver Grows Restless: Perceiving and projecting musical silence." This is based on his ACPA PhD research project: "Picturing Silence: interpreting the musical experience of silence through visual representation".
Keeping silent, listening, speaking up: voice and silence in audience-response to arts and literature
International conference, November 3-5, 2021, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France
In most Western cultures the convention has been that those who receive a work of art do so quietly: whether we look at readers, cinema goers or audiences attending live performances (in the theatre, the opera, …), silence appears as a common denominator and a primary condition of reception. However, contemporary artistic practices often work to challenge this prerequisite, as does a significant portion of academic research into matters of reception. What such work suggests is that audiences can never be considered as perfectly silent agencies. Their voices have a part to play within aesthetic processes – before and after the moment of encounter with a piece, but also in many cases during that very encounter, at the heart of the aesthetic experience itself. The aim of the conference Keeping silent, listening, speaking up: voice and silence in audience-response to arts and literature is to explore the issue of reception through the specific phenomenon of the spectator’s voice, which only exists and can only be understood in its dialectic tension with silence. Read more.
The Receiver Grows Restless: Perceiving and projecting musical silence
The paper that Livingston presents, examines silence in the context of musical performance, and explores markers for silence which can be experienced collectively by audiences. These markers may represent boundaries for silence, and sometimes develop a visual or embodied importance which may seem unexpected in the context of silence's "absence". Spontaneous, controlled, or ritualized performative gesture can enforce, perpetrate or undermine the silence.